Eliot slammed his hand against the door, the homework papers falling out of his grip and tumbling to the floor. Anger poured through him, a blind frustration that all of his efforts had been in vain. Shocked at the intensity of his emotion, he leaned his head against the door and willed himself to breathe slowly until the ferocity pumping through his blood ebbed.
Peace, Eliot. He folded Brynn’s paper and tucked it into his pocket along with her note. He needed sleep. The best solutions always came to him after a night of rest. This would be no exception. He knew there was a solution. He simply had to find it.
I ran all the way home and slammed the apartment door behind me, breathing hard. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve anything. I was a liar, nothing more.
“Brynn? You okay?”
Shannon peeked her head around the hallway from the couch where she had sprawled out. Tendrils of her red hair curled limply down her neck, escaping from the pins that tried valiantly to hold the mass of hair up. She had two more pins between her lips, and she took them out to speak more clearly.
“Hon, you look like you just saw a ghost! What’s wrong?”
I burst into tears, and Shannon immediately got up from the couch and came down the hall to put her arms around me.
“Brynn, hon, oh honey. What is it?” She led me to the couch where I collapsed, my head in my hands. “Was it that test?”
I shook my head, unable to speak.
“It must be bad,” she said, her warm hand rubbing my back as tears ran down my cheeks. “You never cry. Hey, hey. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
After going through almost an entire box of tissues I managed to tell her the story in between sobs.
“Oh, Brynn.” Shannon sighed. “You’re sure he helped you out on the test?”
“I don’t know what else it could have been,” I said, sniffling behind the tissue. “I didn’t know like half of the problems.”
“Then he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah.” I blew my nose and added the tissue to the growing mountain in the waste basket. “I just didn’t think he would do something like that, you know?”
“All guys are assholes. You remember that guitar player I told you about? Never called.”
“No!” I frowned in sympathy. Shannon had been so excited when she came home from that concert. “What a jerk!”
“That’s what I’m saying. The whole lot of them are just jerks and assholes. You want to watch a movie and forget about boys for a while?”
“What movie?”
“I don’t know, something with John Cusack in it?”
“You’re brilliant, Shannon, has anyone ever told you that?”
Shannon beamed at me, and it almost made me feel better. We spent the rest of the night ogling John Cusack’s sexy lips and even broke into the ice cream we had been saving for next week’s finals, completing the stereotype and loving every minute of indulgence. By the time the credits rolled across the screen the internship test seemed like a nightmare I could forget. I went to bed and found the small brass key in my pocket while taking off my jeans. I thought about throwing it in the trash, but put it on the side table instead, the heavy little key clinking on the wood. Maybe I would go back to the midnight piano room later. Much later.
The next morning the sun shone brightly through my window. No more snow. It was back to being California again. I was oddly disappointed.
A loud knocking at the door got me out of bed. It wasn’t even eight in the morning yet. Who could it be?
“Brynn? You got that?” Shannon yelled from her room.
“Got it!” I said, wiping the sleep out of my eyes and stumbling down the hall. In my heart, a secret piece of me hoped that I would find Eliot on the other side of the door. I brushed my hair down with my fingers and buttoned the top of my pajama shirt. If it was him, I didn’t want to look indecent. But when I threw open the door, Mark stood on the other side.
“What happened?” he said.
“Good morning to you, too, Mark,” I said. God, my morning breath was terrible.
“Where were you? Why did you leave before your interview?”
“Hold up,” I said, raising my hands. “How did you know?”
“The department chair guy, Patterson. He called my dad to tell him I had won the internship. They asked if I knew the girl who disappeared at the test. I assume he wasn’t talking about Quentin.”
Mark won. He had won. A stab of jealousy thrust itself into me, and at first I couldn’t breathe.
“Did… did you tell them?”
“No, I said I wasn’t sure,” Mark said. “I thought maybe you had a reason for leaving. I wanted to talk to you first.”